The Barometer Online

Issue date: 2/11/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Jeff Wick From right to left: V-Week coordinator and peer health advocate Amber Calkins teaches Peter Pham, Kathy Nguyen, Kendall Sweeney and Kendra Stokes how to fold origami vaginas Tuesday afternoon in the Women's Center.

In celebration of V-Week at OSU, the Women's Center and Peer Health Advocates hosted two hours of vagina origami yesterday in order to teach men and women alike more about the mystery of the vagina.

The "Vagigami" event was led by Amber Calkins, a senior in biology, who has been coordinating V-Week and the presentation of the Vagina Monologues along with her colleagues and volunteers at PHA.

"There is so much stigma around the vagina," Calkins said. "Events like Vagigami help discuss and normalize these topics."

In the Women's Center, at around 1:30 p.m., four women and one man, who was the husband of one of the women, crowded around a table on their knees and struggled with the complexities of making a look-alike vagina out of paper in neon colors.

Projecting on a screen from a laptop was a YouTube video featuring a man instructing viewers on every bend and fold in the paper to make a "beautiful vagina" from origami.

While forming the clitoris, the man in the video, who remains faceless and unnamed, instructed his viewers to crush it up a little bit. "The clitoris does not need to be sharp," he said.

"Vagigami is a fun, creative way to talk about women's sexuality," Calkins said. "It's important for men to become involved, too."

While there were mostly women at the event, Calkins expressed the significance of men showing their support for women through attendance of seemingly silly programs like making vaginas out of paper.

"Every man knows a woman, has a mother, a sister, a girlfriend, or best friend who's a woman, so it's important for them to understand and show support," Calkins said. "Hopefully what is learned here will be communicated by these men to their other male friends."

While Vagigami served as a platform for releasing and negating the stigma that surrounds all the characteristics of the vagina, what it stands for as a sex symbol and even the word itself, the folding of paper into models of a vagina also served to teach both men and women about women's anatomy. It served as a diagram for how women could please themselves or be pleased by others.

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